WASHINGTON – Former U.S. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson said Thursday that the U.S. government faces a “debt bomb” that can only be confronted if political leaders make changes to entitlement programs like Medicare, adding that otherwise a crisis would be so predictable “it’s like flying into a cliff – you can just see it.”

“The politically easy work was raising the taxes on the rich,” Mr. Paulson said in an interview with The Wall Street Journal. “We need more revenue, but the important, difficult issue which both sides recognize is the growth of the entitlement programs. When you have programs growing faster than the economy, you can’t tax your way out of that.”

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